How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've subsidied

Stat house
January 2002

How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've subsidied
The Environmental Working Group has raised eyebrows and ruffled subsidized feathers across the United States by posting an online database of farm subsidies and their recipients between 1996 and 2000. "To see my subsidies on that site was just like me being seen totally naked at a school reunion," one farmer wrote recently in an online forum maintained by Agriculture.com, the Web site of Successful Farming magazine. "Something has to be done about that site because it is very embarrassing."

Farm Subsidy Payments to Fortune 500 Companies vs. the Average Payment to the Bottom 80 Percent of Farm Subsidy Recipients Nationally (1996 - 2000)
Company	Subsidy Payment
Archer Daniels Midland	$36,305
Boise Cascade Corporation	$11,024
Caterpillar	$171,698
Chevron	$260,223
Deere & Company	$12,875
DuPont	$188,732
Georgia Pacific	$37,156
International Paper	$375,393
John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance	$125,975
Mead Corp	$15,115
Westvaco Corp	$268,740
Avg. payment to bottom 80 percent of farm subsidy recipients nationally	$5,830
Other Fortune 500 companies receiving subsidy payments: Eli Lilly Co, Kimberly-Clark, Navistar, Pfizer, RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co.

Up to now, few outside of the recipient farmers themselves and federal bureaucrats knew precisely who was receiving subsidies, how much, and what for. The amount of the federal government's largese to farmers—more than $20 billion in subsidies have been doled out annually since 1996—left more than a few urbanites wondering how their rural brethren had the nerve to complain about welfare queens during the public assistance reform debates of the 1990s.

The current Farm Bill will expire in September. Debate over its successor continues. The House has already approved a draft bill —formulated when the U.S. budget was still enjoying a surplus—that includes a massive increase in subsidies to $170 billion over 10 years. Just before Christmas, the Farm Bill lost in the Senate by six votes. It will be reconsidered later this month.

EWG insists that its database is not intended simply to embarrass farmers but to demomstrate how badly farm policy has gone askew because of past efforts intended to reform the system. The last farm bill had been advertised as the beginning of the end of the federal government's crop assistance programs. Instead, emergency payments reached historic levels in the last five years.

According to the EWG: "Rural America has seen hard economic times in the last five years, with farm prices and income down dramatically, greater concentration of lands and wealth, and increased bankruptcies. In response, Congress has spent roughly $90 billion, but family farmers have seen little of the money. The bulk of the assistance has gone to a small percentage of the biggest and often most profitable producers."

Subsidy recipients that have turned up on the database include Fortune 500 companies, colleges and universities, at least a dozen members of Congress, the North Carolina Department of Transportation, wealthy city dwellers, lobbyists for major farm organizations, a former Miss America, media mogul Ted Turner, and former Washington Post executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee.

Scottie Pippen, who will earn $18.1 million this year playing basketball for the Portland Trail Blazers, received more than $100,000 in government subsidies over the last five years not to grow crops on his Arkansas farm. Others "just getting by" with federal farm aid include Sam Donaldson, and David Rockefeller, a former chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and grandson of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

The San Francisco Chronicle, in a story entitled "Rich Get Richer On Subsidies," outlined how stockbroker Charles Schwab, whose net worth is estimated to be $4 billion, receives $564,000 in federal price support for his Californian rice farm. "True, Schwab raises rice on his property," the report says, "but his primary reason for ownership is duck and goose hunting."

According to the Washington Post, Indiana Senator Richard. G. Lugar (R), the ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, and a critic of current proposals that would extend subsidies, used the EWG database to discover that that 66 percent of federal farm subsidies in Indiana go to just 10 percent of the farmers subsidized there.

Spokesmen for farm groups say stories about wealthy beneficiaries obscure the real needs of farmers suffering from the lowest commodity prices in 40 years. Many farmers say the environmental group has violated their privacy by publishing their subsidy income. And they worry that non-farmers will be misled by the size of the figures, which initially are presented in five-year lump sums that do not reflect the cost of production.

Like other environmental and family farming groups, the EWG supports a subtantially reduced subsidy program coupled with a broader conservation support effort from the federal government.

Here are just a few of the unusual numbers the EWG was able to uncover in its analysis of the results of the last farm bill:

Ten percent of the biggest (and most profitable) commodity crop producers absorbed two-thirds of all commodity crop money, averaging $39,864 in annual payments. The bottom 80 percent of those eligible saw only $1,089 on average per year. Two-thirds of all farmers and ranchers were completely ineligible for crop assistance.

Thousands of "urban farmers," including more than 4,300 in Houston and 492 in New York, recieved payments totaling more than $536 million between 1996 and 2000. Houston "farmers" top the list of subsidy recipients with nearly $50 million, followed by Omaha ($45.6 million), Dallas ($35.6 million), San Antonio ($30.3 million), and Austin ($29 million).

Fewer than 10 percent of the farmers in California, New Jersey and Florida get help from federal subsidies, while 70 percent or more of the farmers in Iowa and North and South Dakota relied on federal payments.

A press statement from EWG explained why the group had taken the unusual step of building the online database:

"Farm assistance is vital for agriculture and rural America. We need robust programs to support farmers' incomes while helping them protect natural resources and the environment. EWG staff have worked for many years on policies that have brought billions of dollars in support to the farm sector through the Conservation Reserve Program, Wetlands Reserve and other important conservation programs.

"We think even more support is warranted.

"But we also think current policy has badly failed almost everyone in agriculture but the very largest producers of a few favored crops. Most farmers and ranchers—indeed, entire regions of the country—receive little or no assistance.

"Tens of thousands of farmers who have applied for USDA conservation programs, for instance, have been turned away because those programs are chronically under-funded. In almost every state, there are multi-million dollar backlogs of applications of farmers and ranchers waiting to get into the program.

"Before Congress enacts another Farm Bill that will set agriculture policy for the next 5 -10 years, at a cost of $170 billion, the entire country should have better information about how taxpayers have already invested $90 billion since "Freedom to Farm" became law."

For more information:
National Catholic Rural Life Conference
Ag legislation (Senate)
The Environmental Working Group
Farmers abashed, irate over subsidies list

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